Bonuses after tax cut don’t always live up to their billing

What's not to like? Scores of companies, including some of the country's biggest employers, are handing out bonuses, announcing with a flourish that they are sharing the windfall from corporate tax cuts with their workers.

A look at the fine print, though, shows that some of the largess is not nearly as large as company news releases suggest.

Consider retailers like Walmart, Lowe's and Home Depot. They've tied the size of bonuses to tenure, so that only employees who have been with the company for 20 years or more will receive the $1,000 maximum that was highlighted in their announcements. Few employees meet that requirement.

The median tenure for retail workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is three years. At Walmart and Home Depot, that work history results in a $250 bonus, and at Lowe's, $200. And nearly a quarter of American wage and salary workers have logged less than a year with their current employer. For them, bonuses at these big retailers will range from $150 to $200.

"It's a nice gesture on the part of employers," said Ken Abosch, compensation practice leader at Aon Hewitt, a human resources consulting firm. "And it appears to be great for employees who up until this point were not eligible to receive any type of bonus opportunity," such as part-time and hourly workers.

"But I don't see anything that suggests this is going to be ongoing," he added.

Particularly since the recession, businesses have been reluctant to increase fixed costs and have relied more on one-time bonuses than permanent raises, Mr. Abosch said.

A survey of 241 companies by Aon Hewitt in December found that 83 percent did not expect the tax cuts to result in any changes in future salary increases.

A somewhat higher proportion said they expected to award bonuses, but estimated the awards would not exceed 2 percent of annual base salaries.

"That is significantly less than what would be a competitive bonus target," Mr. Abosch said.

Based on data from thousands of companies, a competitive bonus for workers earning, say, $30,000 a year equals 5 percent of base salary, he said. Retail workers who get a $250 bonus, by comparison, are receiving just 0.8 percent. (A $1,000 bonus equals 3.3 percent.)

"And as you go higher up the wage scale, it becomes less and less consequential," he said.

At the same time, some corporations offering bonuses will be able to subsidize their payouts with taxpayer funds. If they announced their plan before the end of 2017, they will be allowed to deduct the cost of the bonuses at last year's 35 percent corporate rate, even if they pay employees in the early months of 2018, after the rate dropped to 21 percent.

"That's a very advantageous tax rule," said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.